Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Two Interviews

Checking in with the Inventor: Tim Berners-Lee ""The general public is seizing on the Web as a way to have a conversation," he said in our own chat this week. "That for me is very inspiring. It doesn't tell me something about the Web. It tells me something about humanity. The hope for humanity is that people do want to work things out. They do want to come to common understandings, and they will do it by constantly refining the way they've expressed their own ideas--and occasionally, on a good day, listening to the way other people have expressed theirs.""

Under the Iron interview with Aaron Swartz "You’ve put a tremendous amount of work in, for example, RDF and RSS 1.0 (the latter using the former). People say this is the basis of the “Semantic Web”. Could you cue us in on what they hope to achieve with this, how they will make everyone start doing something to achieve it, and what exactly it is we’ll start doing? Do you believe this is possible?

So, uh, here’s the plan:

1. Collect data

2. ???????

3. PROFIT!!!

Uh, more specifically, the idea is to get everyone sharing their vast databases of information in RDF with each other. Then we can write programs that put this data together to answer questions and take actions to make our lives easier."